More stats from the 377 page (UK) Ofcom Communications Markets Report, in particular ones that reinforce the fact that TV-led campaigns or properties are very often more effective when combined with online.     Three findings in particular (with graphs)

1 – Live, scheduled TV carries a low attention threshold. Compared to other forms of media, consumers are least likely to give live TV and radio their undivided attention.     Social media and print have medium attention scores, while games and downloaded video content rank best when it comes to consumer focus (hence the wisdom of spending money on in-game promotions).

2 – We’re now more likely to ‘media stack.’ 20% of media time is now simultaneous – very often involving TV + the Internet and mobile phones.  Among the under 25s that proportion rises to 29%.  16-24 year olds managed to fit just over nine and a half hours’ worth of media into a little  over six and a half hours of actual time.

3 – The most popular YouTube channels are variations of mainstream media properties. It’s a myth that we want to spend our time on YouTube watching home made ‘world’s funniest animal’ type videos.   Instead, much as we do on TV, we want to see content with high production values, involving recognisable names.

Where’s the proof that TV + online work in tandem works?  Here are three random examples:

1 – PHD and Medialets developed a True Blood iPhone ad to support the last series.   Though we can question whether HBO’s 38% increase in viewers was down to the mobile campaign, the best click-through rate of 8.73% that the campaign achieved was way beyond the usual display ad rate of 0.02%.

2 – Speaking of click-throughs, Coke achieved one of 6%, when it ran a Promoted Tweets / Twitter World Cup campaign.   Running a World Cup promo while people were tweeting about matches made sense – Twitter saw a clear spike in activity, including a record for the number of tweets per second during the recent tournament.

3 – One of my favourite examples is this one:  US broadcaster Oxygen piloted a “real time viewing party” called Oxygen Live around one of its hit shows – Bad Girls Club.   This pulled in comments and conversations from several networks such as Twitter into an online hub while the show was airing.

Oxygen Live kicked off 30 mins before each show started, meaning that it was trending on Twitter 5 mins before each episode and there was a consistent increase in viewers over the hour.   In fact in the US West Coast when they *didn’t* run Oxygen Live, ratings were up 9% among women aged 18-49.   Once Oxygen Live launched that ratings then saw a much bigger increase, up to 57%.

And as far as a successful example of integrating TV advertising and an online campaign goes….Old Spice anyone?

As a final point, it’s worth noting that two of the new social networks that have created a buzz over the past few weeks, Miso and Glue, have a model that’s directly related to people checking into entertainment events and TV programmes, as opposed to locations.

We’ve got a more detailed summary of the Ofcom report in the latest (agency) Rabbit feed, the html version is here.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Ofcom: multi-tasking media junkies on the rise (channel4.com)
• TV viewing increases despite internet (guardian.co.uk)
• The media: how is it affecting our lives? (newstatesman.com)

That’s a question Hitwise’s Robin Goad asked earlier this week when he showed that – in the UK – Facebook was now getting one in six page views, or 16.73% of the total.   That puts it in front of Google UK (8.22%), ebay (5.39%) and YouTube (2.64%).

Robin makes his observation by pointing out that Facebook’s UK growth rate is starting to slow.   Just like in the US, where last month, Facebook user rates among 18-44 year olds dropped (but grew among over 45s), Facebook saw a slight dip in its UK page view share last month, which could of course be seasonal due to colleges and Universities breaking up for the year.

Facebook does of course have 500 million worldwide users, hence the question of whether it can realistically grow much more.   And of course, it raises the other question of whether it will really ever be replaced (the same question constantly asked of Google in search)?

An interesting piece over on Flowtown says no, giving various reasons from the fact that a lot of people genuinely use it to manage their online lives, the applications market, and the fact that brands and businesses gravitate to it now almost as a default.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Facebook nears saturation point in UK (newstatesman.com)
• Facebook’s UK growth tails off – where now for Zuckerberg’s Billion? (thenextweb.com)

You know the received wisdom that you need time to make your YouTube videos a success, with people slowly discovering it and passing it on?  More often than not its wrong – according to TubeMogul (via Thought Gadgets) half the audience for the average online video will have come and gone within the first six days.

According to Business Insider our online attention spans are definitely getting shorter:

” In 2008, it took 14 days for a video to get 50% of its views and 44 days to get 75% of its views.”

In other words, the shelf life of the average video has now halved.  Some other stats that build on this one:

If supported by social media recommendations, people will be more engaged with your video.  Another TubeMogul and Brightcove survey found that music videos recommended on Twitter are watched on average for a minute longer.

In terms of the chances of your video becoming a huge hit with 1 million+ views, you are 6x more likely to get hit by a bus anyway

Related articles by Zemanta

• YouTube videos in Powerpoint in 5 Easy Steps (jonburg.com)
• How to Deal With YouTube Haters (chris.pirillo.com)
• Our Favorite YouTube Videos This Week: Brits, Biebs, Babies & More (mashable.com)

Steyn and Aziz, two of the Cows in Cape Town, posed an interesting question this afternoon. Who owns your tweets? Clearly re-tweeting is a big part of Twitter culture, but do you have any sort of intellectual property claim over what’s your content?

There are several answers to this question.  One of them from analyst Jeremiah Owyang, is that quite possibly your boss might be the owner and not you…in addition to owning any Facebook photos, You Tube videos etc developed and posted at work. The reason? “Employees sign employment contracts that may indicate that all intellectual property created during employment may be owned by the company.”

It’s obviously not that straight forward. A Twitter feed that has a lot of followers and appears on a lot of lists is clearly useful to a company, but would it have value if the person left, and would you really want to enforce it? However, solicitor Lisa J Borodkin, who comments on Jeremiah’s blog says that:

“It’s important in the age of the blog and Twitter that people understand that a clause claiming all ‘intellectual property’ created during the term of employment would be property of the company, would cover tweets and blog posts. This provision would also cover anything else creative the person did on the side, such as writing a screenplay, or creating a comic strip, even purely for fun.”

As a result, the solution here would be two fold. First of all, to have employment contracts read that only work related content belongs to the boss. And secondly to develop clear social media guidelines for staff (we’re doing so currently at Cow, as much to protect the people we work with as ourselves).

Finally, looking at the question of ‘who owns your tweets?’ on a wider scale, the answer is you do. But there is an important caveat as this Mr Tweet blog post states. Twitter says you own what you post, yet it can also refuse service and close accounts.

And when it comes to source attribution and re-using content for gain, there would be a grey area where, say Twitter is used to break a news story. “That tweet becomes the source, who does it belong to?” The Mr Tweet post says we’ll never know definitively until there’s a court case about it, which I imagine shouldn’t be too far off.
Image – Kumar Appaiah

Related articles by Zemanta

• Are We Addicted To Giving Our Own Opinions (chrisbrogan.com)
• What Social Search Means To Your Business (socialmediaexplorer.com)

Metrics company Comscore has come out with a study on global Internet use by hours spent surfing. Surprisingly, Microsoft’s range of websites – in particular Windows Live Messenger – leads, with 15% of time spent online globally.

However at the same time as Australian website Digital Media points out, YouTube and Facebook, arguably the two highest profile players in the social media category, took up almost 10% of the 27 billion global Internet hours people in Sept 09.

Looking at Facebook, its share of hours grew by 193%. It also over-indexes significantly in both Europe (6.6% share vs 5.1% globally), and the Middle East / Africa (where it has 8%).

It’s worth noting that Comscore’s data excluded time spent surfing from a mobile device. If that had been factored in, then Facebook’s share would almost certainly have been higher. According to Facebook’s Director of Mobile, Henri Moissinac, the network now has 65 million mobile users – or 25% of its total reach.

Recently, stats showed that Facebook had reached almost 100 million users in Europe. Though the UK is by far the leading territory with 20+ million plus users, the network showed particularly strong growth in Italy, Germany and Turkey.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The 10 Biggest Social Media Stories This Week (mashable.com)
• How a SA company might just change the mobile app game forever. (techsmart.co.za)

Research firm Sysosmos (the people who recently published stats on Twitter ‘power users’) has come out with a study on online video.

However, rather than recycling the old line about how much online video is growing, Syomos looked at the extent to which bloggers use online video.   That’s obviously important for the simple reason that if your viral is going to go anywhere, bloggers will have a great deal to do with it.

Not surprisingly, You Tube leads in terms of bloggers embedding videos into their blogs, with 84% using it.   However, Vimeo is ahead of Daily Motion and Metacafe in second place with 8% of embeds.   Vimeo (which we ourselves use) positions itself as a higher quality (in both senses of the word) video sharing channel and certainly among online influencers it does better than it does among the mass of consumers.

The best days to embed videos?  Tuesdays and Wednesdays.   This ties back to the fact that a lot of bloggers (present company included) will do more during the working week, and also attract more blog traffic, and much less during weekends.   And again, not surprisingly, lunchtimes are peak online video times for blogs.

The US obviously leads in terms of bloggers using online video (32%), though Brazil (6.6%) beats the UK (4,4%) into second place.   Purely anecdotally, I know that a lot of our campaigns have – randomly – been picked up by Brazilian sites without any rhyme or reason why that should be the case.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Visibility via Video: How to Extend Your Reach Online (buildabetterblog.com)
• How to Create a Video Channel From Different Video Sharing Sites (maketecheasier.com)
• Go Viral on Web 2.0-One Billion served (seowithfries.com)

The other day I posted about what marketing agencies see as a measure of viral video success. Unbelievably over a quarter peg the success rate at a million views or more, which to me seems like a case of taking the big number and plucking it out of thin air.

Why? Because getting up to 50k is an achievement given the thousands of brand films that languish on YouTube with several hundred views.

As new research from TubeMogul shows, even though video sharing sites host the actual films, less than half (45%) of us now discover content by browsing through these sites. Which could be why ‘featured’ clips on YouTube used to get 500,000 views, but now often don’t reach 100,000.

Where does the other 55% come from?

Search engines: 11.18%,
Social networks: 3.66%,
Social bookmarking sites: 3.19%,
Video search engines: 0.63%,
Email/IM: 0.05%

“Everything else (almost all blogs, from the thousands we scanned): 80.88% of all referred traffic.”

In other words, forget about seeding your video on specialist video search engines, or hoping people will forward it on by email. Blogs and online media are the key to success. Or, according to TubeMogul:

”These results likely come as bad news to the myriad sites that are set up with online video discovery in mind, such as video search engines, which source a relatively modest 0.63% of all referred video views.

”To those trying to unlock a formula for making a video go viral, perhaps this gives some clues: reach out to bloggers and optimize a video’s meta-data to ensure it ranks highly on intra-video site plugs.”

Image – Kimba

The other month we posted about Tube Mogul’s stats showing that most online video viewers don’t last beyond the first minute. As a result it won’t come as a huge surprise to learn that Tube Mogul has now found that most Internet TV shows lose most of their viewers after the first episode.

As reported in Ad Age, online audiences suffer from a high boredom and low attention threshold. 64% of viewers drop off after episode one, and if you have a ten episode series by the end there are not many viewers left.

Previously web TV series could be produced and uploaded with the sheer novelty value attracting a certain amount of publicity that in turn made the investment worthwhile. Now advertisers want some kind of certainty about audiences before ponying up the ad or sponsorship cash, especially given the current climate.

According to Tremor Media CEO Jason Glickman, “the basic principle is there aren’t enough views to go around.”

Interestingly, the article makes the point that Internet video viewers are no longer as willing to be herded into featured picks or spots, so publisher endorsement is not what it once was.

A year ago a featured video as chosen by YouTube editors got 500,000+ views now they usually hit less than 100,000. Consumers are now savvy enough to find what they want without someone from on high providing a large direction sign.

At the same time, previous research published by Internet video site Veoh showed that heavily engaged viewers (ie those who watch more than an hour of Internet video a week), who account for 40% of all online viewers, are twice as likely to remember web TV than ordinary TV ads.

So, the lesson seems to be saying that even if the numbers by episode ten are small, they are at least paying attention and drinking your brand’s kool aid.

Image – Phoenix Daily Photo